By Chris Quick on July 29, 2010
*From 1901-2010 I’m in love with the new Baseball-Reference WAR data. WAR, or Wins Above Replacement, is the uber-stat that attempts to encompass the total value of what makes a player, erm, valuable. With the development of FanGraphs and other saber-slanted websites, WAR has become a pretty well known statistic. If you’re new to the [...]
Posted in Giants, Plots | Tagged bobby bonds, bobby murcer, defense, Dick Dietz, graphs, Plots, total zone
By Chris Quick on May 23, 2010
The Giants drafted Brandon Crawford out of the 2008 First Year Player Draft from UCLA. The talented college shortstop was projected as a first round talent but he fell to the 4th round when he struggled in his final college year. The book on Crawford was as follows: terrific defender at SS but he swings-and-misses [...]
Posted in Giants | Tagged 2011 team, brandon crawford, defense, Edgar Renteria, J.J. Hardy, juan uribe, shortstop, WAR
By Chris Quick on May 17, 2010
It’s hard to say that Baseball-Reference could get any more useful. But, Baseball-Reference just got even more useful. Sabermetricians have always been on the search for the best way to measure wins contributed by players. Baseball Prospectus has WARP, Bill James has win shares and now we are presenting Sean Smith’s Wins Above Replacement or [...]
Posted in Giants | Tagged Baseball-Reference, defense, total zone, WAR
By Chris Quick on March 11, 2010
Q: Who was the 3rd most valuable position player on the Giants last season by wins above replacement? A: Andres Torres — Torres was a weird bird for the 2009 Giants. He was a 31-year-old minor league journeyman with a scant 285 career plate appearances in the majors before the season started. Originally drafted by [...]
Posted in Giants | Tagged andres torres, center field, defense
By Chris Quick on August 14, 2009
Run prevention is a hugely important team skill in baseball. Baseball highlights will often be composed of those who can hit the longest home runs, but having a top defensive team can do wonders for a team’s record. For example, take the Giants. Collectively as a team the Giants can’t hit their way out of [...]
Posted in General Baseball, Plots | Tagged defense, FIP, Plots, team defense, UZR
By Chris Quick on April 3, 2009
This is something I’ve wanted to do for awhile. Round up some of my favorite Giants bloggers and discuss a few questions that I think will be important to the team this season. The Giants are still in a period of transition and this season should be exciting on a few different levels. Each blogger [...]
Posted in Giants | Tagged 2009 team, answers, Brian Sabean, bruce bochy, defense, offense, questions
By Chris Quick on January 22, 2009
I’ve been playing around lately with some graphs depicting what a player contributes — offense, defense, and both combined with a positional adjustment — versus the theoretical replacement level. It’s a pretty quick way to see the peaks and valley’s of a players last few years. Aaron Rowand might want to forget his first season [...]
Posted in Giants, Plots | Tagged aaron rowand, bUZR, center field, defense, Plots, wRAA
By Chris Quick on December 17, 2008
A quick post this morning on the defense from 2002-2008. Thanks to FanGraphs for making bUZR publicly available. I’ve really had a lot of fun looking through the data. I decided to use bUZR from the years 2002-2008 to find the best and worst defender on each Giants team in each year. My criteria was [...]
Posted in Giants | Tagged aaron rowand, barry bonds, bUZR, dave roberts, defense, deivi cruz, marquis grissom, omar vizquel, Pedro Feliz, randy winn, UZR
By Chris Quick on December 16, 2008
This past week the Houston Astros decided to non-tender Ty Wigginton rather than extend a contract to him and increase his salary through arbitration. The Chron article that I just linked to suggests that after arbitration, Wigginton would have been looking at a salary around $6M. He made $4.35M last year. Because the Astros did [...]
Posted in General Baseball, Giants | Tagged defense, free agents, Third Base, ty wigginton
By Chris Quick on December 8, 2008
Exciting news this weekend, FanGraphs is now providing UZR data — Ultimate Zone Rating — on it’s website. UZR for those who don’t know, is one of the more heralded defensive systems out there. Consider UZR another handy tool to stick in your tool belt when it comes to player analysis. UZR splits the field [...]
Posted in Giants | Tagged aaron rowand, defense, Edgar Renteria, eugenio velez, fred lewis, omar vizquel, randy winn, rich aurilia, UZR
